In his short poem ‘Casualty’, Gerry Abbott responds to the use of euphemisms for killing often seen and heard in the media. Terms such as ‘taken out’ and ‘friendly fire’ have become commonplace in British newspapers and news broadcasts but he questions the role that these euphemisms play in the reporting of war stories.

He looks first at the use of euphemisms in daily life as a way of avoiding delicate or taboo subject matter and refers to these as ‘respectful’ euphemisms. Included here are terms such as ‘passed away’ or ‘gone to meet their Maker’ to refer to dying, the dead become ‘deceased’ and often the dead are not ‘buried’ but ‘laid to rest’, with the grave becoming their ‘last home’. These, he says, are used as acts of social kindness and show concern for the feelings of our fellow human beings.

He then turns his attention to the increased use in recent years of military euphemisms used in war reporting.He points to subtle differences in terms such as ‘friendly fire’ and ‘collateral damage’. Both terms are used to refer to the accidental (or ‘careless’ as Abbott puts it) act of killing people but the former refers to combatants killed by their own side while the latter refers to civilians caught up in the crossfire. He is especially scathing of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ which has pleasant connotations of healing and hygiene when, in fact, it is used to refer to the deliberate mass slaughter of civilians. These, he argues, are not respectful in purpose but are ‘deliberate attempts to obfuscate military actions, to hide their mistakes and to excuse the perpetrators’.

Of course, as Abbott acknowledges, euphemisms thrive in spheres other than military contexts. He points to terms such as ‘creative accounting’ and ‘massaging’ to mean the falsifying of financial records and the use of ‘climate change’ when meteorologists mean climate damage. In Parliament, where members are not permitted to accuse each other of lying, phrases such as ‘economical with the truth’ and ‘created a false impression’ have sprung up.

The main thrust of this paper, then, is that the use of euphemisms in these contexts points to a lack of truthfulness. Abbott proposes that acronyms such as WMD (‘weapons of mass destruction’) to refer to powerful missiles and bombs should be uttered/written in full and replaced with ‘weapons of mass death’.

Monday, 11 July 2011

David Graddol considers this question in relation to China’s rise to becoming the world’s second largest economy and the expectation that it will become the world’s largest manufacturer within the next year. Will its economic rise mean that its language will reach equally global proportions? The rise in the number of users of a language is of course linked to economic and political developments. The rise of English can be seen within the historical context of the spread of the British Empire and, in more recent years, the global importance of the US economy as well as the impact of Microsoft in computer technology.

However, as Graddol points out, the language situation is somewhat different in China than in English speaking countries. All Chinese speakers share the same written code but, unlike English, the different varieties of Chinese are not necessarily mutually intelligible. Standard Mandarin, or Putonghua as it is known as in China, is only spoken by just over half the population. In Hong Kong and Macau the standard spoken language is Cantonese. It is this tension between the different groups of speakers which may determine the role that Mandarin and English play in the future of China and, indeed, around the world. As Cantonese speakers strive to maintain their variety against the surge of Mandarin they may opt to use English as a lingua franca as a way of protecting the future of Cantonese. Of course, much will depend on whether people’s attitudes change and whether economic factors come into play if Mandarin becomes the language of power in Cantonese speaking regions.

Graddol reminds us that Chinese is not the only language to be considered as a competitor to English and that in some regions across the globe Spanish is increasingly the partner language to English. He does not reach a conclusion on the future of English but suggests that ‘different regional patterns of English-knowing bilingualism’ is the likely outcome with ‘no single language taking over the role of English as a global lingua franca’.

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Graddol, D. (2010). Will Chinese take over from English as theworld’s most important language? English Today 104 Vol. 26 (4): 3-4.

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